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GRAVY

My first novel started with a mole. Yes, a MOLE - a freckle, a birthmark, whatever you want to call it.

I was at the pool with my daughter getting ignored by our swim instructor when a lifeguard with a particularly ripped abdomen walked by. He stopped to flirt with one of the female lifeguards and my eyes flew directly to an adorable mole on the top can of his six-pack.

"How cute!" I thought (among other things). "He looks like a character in a romance novel!"

So I went home and started writing fiction for the first time. That was over a year ago and I still haven't been able to stop. GRAVY is the story of a suburban housewife who wants another baby, but gets a man with a mole instead.

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June 11, 2012

High times!

About a year ago Joel became a partner in a start-up. He and two of his colleagues decided to start a medical marijuana shop and lo, The Aurora Clinic was born. One of the partners is a doctor, the other is the money guy and Joel is the business development director. He's also the managing partner.

Before I go on, I should probably mention that NONE OF THEM smokes weed.

Which is totally their competitive advantage. With most of the other card clinics in P-Town, you get a contact high just walking through the front door. At Aurora, you get a clipboard, a doctor who actually gives a shit and absolutely zero blacklight posters of marijuana leafs.

(Or Bob Marley.)

It's pretty much EXACTLY the opposite of what you were thinking when I said "Medical Marijuana Clinic."

Needless to say, I was immediately on board with this idea and it has warmed my cockles to see how excited Joel is about building something out of nothing. All the marketing he's spent a year tweaking is finally paying off and the clinic is amazingly busy. They're already looking into a second (and fifth) location. But as I may have mentioned in my last post, staffing has become a bit of an issue. Since we lost all our non-medical staff last week (karma be damned), Joel and I have spent every waking moment answering phones, filling out paperwork and trying to decipher office systems that neither of us has ever seen before.

It's been fun!

The truth is I LOVE clinic days (we only see patients on Wednesdays and Fridays) because they are CRAZY and I basically don't get to sit down for long enough to write my own name. I love interacting with the patients and seeing how grateful they are when they walk out the door. I know not everyone believes in medical cannabis, but tell that to the guy withering away with AIDS who hasn't had an appetite in two years or the 72-year old woman with a back injury who gets hauled into detox at Kaiser for a morphine overdose.

Marijuana is medicine. It's more effective and has fewer side-effects than narcotics. It's really that simple.

So yeah, I'm happy to pitch in, even without a paycheck.

Of course, today was my first NON-clinic day and man, am I WIPED. I spent eight hours figuring out databases and excel spreadsheets and newsletter passwords and when I got home at 6:30, I realized I had NO IDEA how I'd driven there. I had become a total brain-eating zombie.

All I can say is that I have NEVER EVER been more grateful for my vagina job. I can spend eight hours a day bending over tweezing ingrown hairs under a mag-lamp and I'm not HALF as tired as I was after sitting in a super comfy chair staring at a screen all day.

(The first was gastric bypass surgery. The second was leaving Dave. The third was Joel.)

One of today's highlights was when an old guy walked in hoping to get an appointment and our temp (who is already a fucking ROCKSTAR) was helping him, I walked out to see if she needed me to answer any questions. He recognized me from the website or maybe from Joel's newspaper ads and said, "Oh! I was hoping to see you here!" (wink wink!) Oh how I love me some dirty old men.

When he asked where my white coat was it made my day to say, "I'm not a doctor! I don't even WORK here!"

Because no, I don't work here and I'm kinda glad I don't, but I'm THRILLED to be a part of the clinic. It feels like a family business and a start-up all rolled into one and even though I can't stand sitting in a chair all day, the clinic itself has my entrepreneurial genes humming. Joel is brimming with ideas and some of them are pretty fucking great.

Oddly enough, neither of us thunk up our dream jobs ourselves, but it turns out we're both busy doing them.

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I live about 2000 miles from your clinic, so I will never be able to visit it unfortunately. I was just curious if, in addition to HIV and other chronic pain patients, Joel is dealing with any migraine sufferers that have found no relief with other medications? I have been reading your blog for years and rarely comment, but am so happy to see you happy.